Pages

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

About a six months or so before my dad had his stroke, he and I started looking into his war record with the RAF during WWII.
We had a lot of fun doing it.
His time in service was always something special to him and he had great memories about his time served.
He had his war record book, but his memory wasn't good enough or enough time had passed where all the abbrevations no longer were clear to him.
Luckily, while doing research into his squadron's we found someone in Belguim that was keeping a site for one of his old units, 350 Squadron.
With his help, and another Englishman's, we were able to fill in most of the details.
We sent to Belguim (not hard with email) a photo we had of dad in uniform, and a nice piece about dad was added, along with the picture, to the 350 web site.

Here is the picture.

The 350 web site has in it's gallery lots of photos of the unit, but most are of the Belguim flyers and crew.
Well, once we got all dads info set up, emails back and forth with a little Bio. on dad, the web master thought I would be interested in a DVD of all the pictures he had for the unit.
I said sure, I would love it.
I wasn't expecting much, and thought we had all the pictures we would ever see of dad in uniform.
When the DVD arrived, I popped it in.
Low and behold (do they say that anymore?) the second picture to come up was this one. . . .

The crew member on the wing on the right sure looked like dad!
I showed the picture to mom and brother, because there were no names of the ground crew on it. And both agreed it must be dad. The markings on the plane were for an exercise that took place during the time dad would have been with the 350.
We were able to find out the name of the pilot, but not the other crew member.
Dad always loved the Spitfire, even still has a tool for working on them in his workshop.
He was with the unit for about 18 months, even working with some of the Eagle Squadron on occasion.
Below is a link to the site if you are interested.http://www.350sqn.be/